Day: 23 June 2016

One of the most powerful features in Power BI and Excel is supporting geospatial visualisations. In Excel we can use Map visualisation in Power View, or use Power Map directly. In Power BI, as you know, there are two built-in visualisations supporting geographic coordinate data, Map and Filled map. They work beautifully if you have enough data supported by Bing Maps. But, there are some issues with Map visualisations in both Power BI and Excel. In this post I address some of the issues I faced myself and I’ll provide the solutions for the issues. As “Filled Map” and “Map” visualisations in Power BI are very similar my focus in this post would be on “Map” visualisation. My intention is not explaining Power View and Power Map that much so my focus in this article would be on Power BI more than the other two.

Requirements

To experiment everything I explain in this post you need to have:

The new SQL Server sample, WideWorldImportersDW (WWI). You can download it here

The latest version on Power BI Desktop (current version is 2.35.4399.381 64-bit (May 2016))

Get Data in Power BI

Map Issues In Power BI

Wrong Cities in Power BI

Select “City” column then change its Data Category to City (Data Category is on “Modeling” tab from the ribbon)

Put a Map visual into the page

Put “City” on Location

Put “Total Excluding Tax” on Size

As you see sales distributed across different countries, but, this is not quiet right.

Put a slicer on the page then put “Country” on the slicer

Click “United States” to filter the Map

Oops! This is not quiet right. What happened is that Bing Map Engine gets confused with the city names so that it shows a city with the same name outside of the US, just like New Plymouth which a city in New Zealand, but, the New Plymouth we have in our data source is the New Plymouth from Idaho in the US.